Category: Wednesday’s Child

  I am hardly revealing a secret when I say that, despite the century-long attempt at imposing federalism on Italy – with law, education, and mass communications among the means at the central government’s disposal – this, thankfully, remains a uniquely fragmented European country.  Time and again the visitor is reminded that it is regional autonomy, de facto if not de jure, that makes this so tolerable a place to live or even, provided one speaks some Italian, to visit, to swim, to suntan, and to eat.  An American may well reflect that his own United States, had history played...

I have in my library a dictionary of Russian criminal and jailhouse slang, an evolved argot that retains the syntax and grammar of conventional speech, but replaces many verbs and most of the nouns with occult formations based on a number of European languages and dialects, from Lithuanian to Yiddish.  When one flips through this dictionary, one is struck by the fact that a good quarter of the nouns, even if their primary significance is to do with the business of thieving or fencing, have the derogatory meaning of “passive homosexual.” This, of reflection, is hardly surprising.  The environment of...

Last week a sympathetic soul had written to me from London, urging me to pitch a book, or at the very least a proposal for one, to a publisher in his circle of acquaintance.  I was grateful for the attention and did not want to be uncivil, so I muttered some generalities of a philosophical sort by way of reply and left it at that.  In hindsight, however, it occurs to me that my response could have run along the following lines. Me, pitch?  No, my dear fellow, let them pitch. Because the question is not – and I’m now...

Last November (“An Awl in Sackcloth”), and again in January (“More Awls in Sackcloth”), I regaled the reader with tales of intellectual misadventure suggested by the preposterous figure of Russia’s omnipotent culture tsar, Vladimir Medinsky.  I cannot resist adding an orchestral coda, a dramatic postscript, a final malediction. The denouement of the tragic farce takes us to a town called Belgorod, a place we may be excused for knowing little about because it is a provincial hellhole just this side of the Russian border with Ukraine. The town, however, boasts an “institution of higher learning,”  Belgorod State University, which in...

Well, from Marbella, actually, but it occurred to me that having a posh name in the title would look like I was putting on airs and that the name of Spain’s great tourist hub – Malaga Costa del Sol Airport, whence 17 million oafs, badly hungover and savagely sunburnt, return every year to the satanic mills of Great Britain – might better suit the persona I cultivate and reveal here. Yet cavernous is the abyss of snobbery.  While I was dousing myself with pink champagne on the lawn of a friend’s villa, a madam I used to know in London...

It is true that the word “bastard” was not equally offensive in every period of history, as we know that William the Conqueror is called “William the Bastard” in some contemporary official screeds, but after Shakespeare, in King Lear, fashioned the underlying notion into the definitive metaphor of vice, the word was pretty much spoken for. The term’s origin, in the age of homosexual marriage and gender dysphoria, may seem rather innocuous, since etymologically it does not mean anything more shameful than “here today, gone tomorrow,” an approach to conduct regarded as perfectly legitimate at least since the great moral...

I first visited the Shostakovich Center–Association Internationale Dimitri Chostakovitch, if you go by the name on the doorbell–last October, and wrote about it in this space. A friend, now dead, used to live across the road in the Rue des Saints-Pères. The street, which marks the border between the 6th and 7th  Paris arrondissements, dates back to the sixteenth century, with all the glories of intervening ages sucked up by it as by a sponge of sedimentary calcite. The Center is in a small courtyard, its stones overgrown with ivy and moss, and of an afternoon one can sit on...